Supervisors: Michela Beretta & Lars Frederiksen
Discussants: Ingo Kleindienst & Sascha Steinmann

Abstract
Crowdsourcing platforms provide users with opportunities to showcase creativity, collaborate, and compete for recognition and success. However, strategic actions play a crucial role in determining which projects gain visibility and attention from an online community.

This study investigates how strategic actions influence project success on a crowdsourcing platform by integrating machine learning techniques and a real-life data from a global crowdsourcing platform.

The findings reveal that expert endorsements and sustained engagement are the strongest predictors of success, while social capital enhances visibility but is not sufficient alone. Contrary to prior research, early vote accumulation does not strongly predict success, emphasizing the importance of long-term strategic actions over initial momentum.

The study highlights that success strategies form a continuum, where various actions reinforce one another rather than functioning as independent choices. These insights contribute to understanding strategic behavior in crowdsourcing and offer practical implications for participants, platform managers, and researchers studying digital competition dynamics.

Everyone is welcome!